November 2023

Readers will notice that I haven’t written for a while. I don’t have any excuses really.  Writing is an important activity for aspiring academics and there really is no good reason why I haven’t written anything here for seven months (seven!). There are explanations though. In April I began teaching in the summer term.  As I do, I accepted way too much teaching and for the first three weeks of the initial summer term, I was teaching four sections (four!). I enjoy teaching (I really do) but this was way too much. This pace was reduced somewhat in the second term of the summer semester, but I still had three sections to teach in the first three weeks with one continuing until the end of July. I will not take on that much teaching again (you can confront me with this statement someday). In May, I participated in my oral candidacy exam to attempt to become a PhD candidate. This exam is supposed to be the culmination of classwork and research proposal development and the beginning of the candidacy phase of the PhD process.  This is the normative procedure. Only that my research proposal was not accepted.  As my sponsor once said to me, “you don’t want to fail the oral exam” but this is now exactly what happened. “Where now?” was the question and I had to wonder if the last three years had been time wasted. I definitely had some re-thinking to do.

The first step I took in the re-thinking was to attend the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) conference in Toronto. When I applied in the fall of 2022, I was hoping to present some early findings from my research. Only I didn’t have any research to present. I didn’t feel like going and being a “pretender.” My supervisor and others encouraged me to go however so away I went. After my first presentation, one of the attenders said, “Hey, you should go and hear Dr. Mandzuk from the University of Manitoba. His research seems similar to what you are doing.” When I went, I was amazed at what I saw and heard. Dr. M’s research on Deans of Education during the pandemic and other crises was almost exactly the same as mine!  A Stakian collective case study of the leadership experiences of Deans of Ed. He even used the same conception of complexity theory by UB that I was planning to use of leadership being explained as the entanglement of the administrative, emergent, and adaptive functions of leadership. This made a me a little angry at first since I felt that my application of complexity leadership theory had not been well received. With a little more reflection, this reinforced for me that my thinking wasn’t totally in left field. I later had a brief discussion with Dr. M. at the conference and exchanged emails with him on how I was planning to re-think my research. As well as his recent research article presented at the CSSE, he was also kind enough to send me his book, Navigating Uncertainty,

Dr. M’s book argues that leaders require “specific guidance to explore, understand, make sense of, and respond to uncertainty and the complex problems and crises that arise from it” (Hasinoff & Mandzuk, 2018, p. VIII). The book goes on to present a 5-step sensemaking process for resolving uncertainty called the Certainty Matrix. The treatment of uncertainty as a serious academic concept in this book, along with a systematic framework for developing a response builds a foundation for re-thinking my approach to the topic.

From this, I have determined that what I want to learn about are responses to the phenomenon of uncertainty which is faced by all leaders but which in recent years it has been increased to a new level.  Radical uncertainty is a term used by Romeijn and Roy (2014) to describe “the state of utter cluelessness” (p. 1224) felt subjectively by leaders when responding to uncertainty from multiple disruptive events.  These authors further define that radical uncertainty arises when there is doubt about assumptions, but no means present to identify alternate assumptions around a new set of ideas to reach a clear conclusion (Romeijn & Roy, 2014). Tourish (2020) defines radical uncertainty as arising from “ambiguous events [which] lack obvious precedents, clear solutions and straightforward criteria for evaluation” (p. 265). In my last entry, we discussed how Kay and King (2021) characterized situations of radical uncertainty as a mystery and not merely a puzzle. Puzzles have specific rules and lead to specific, well-defined solutions which can be solved even if difficult. By contrast, mysteries are vague and indeterminate, have no verifiable solution, and often lead to incomplete responses and understandings (Kay & King, 2021). For educational leaders, the pandemic and its aftermath were not a puzzle with a single solution, but a mystery which required adaptions beyond linear descriptions when determining responses (Tourish, 2020). Throw in further disruptions such as staff shortages, public controversy, or inconsistent attendance patterns and clear solutions are difficult to determine.  More guidance is needed which explore how leaders can cope with radical uncertainty where “the margin of error is high and consequences of failure potentially catastrophic” (Tourish, 2020, p. 265). The objectives of the study will be to explore the sources and management responses to uncertainty with additional questions about the influence and role of local setting (context) and interactions with others will be asked to gain insight into the primary purpose of how responses to uncertainty were determined.

The hardest part of all this is sitting down to write again. In my research methodology class we were asked to identify what the biggest challenge is in our writing. I used an analogy from my brief time as a swimmer. Getting in a cold pool early in the morning requires an extra dose of courage. Swimming laps is a grind. But there is little like the feeling of exhilaration and accomplishment when getting out of the pool. To get this state of exhilaration with my writing, I need to take a breath, get in the pool, and start grinding out the laps. Stay tuned.